Voices of the Enslaved

What can the archives of slavery reveal about the people who lived through it? While there is a wealth of archival material on the Dutch transatlantic slave trade, testimonials by the enslaved are conspicuously absent, resulting in a skewed image of the past.Karwan Fatah-Black and Camilla de Koning attempt to access the reality behind the colonizers' vision by reading between the lines, filling in the gaps in the documents we have and recreating the everyday experiences of the enslaved. Investigating archival material that has rarely, if ever, been explored, the authors follow the historical lives of enslaved men, women and children, reconstructing the journey from abduction and sale in West Africa, through the harrowing passage and life on the plantations in the Caribbean, to the fates of those who fled into the jungle or rebelled, and finally the fraught road to freedom through manumission.Through careful archival research and reconstruction, Voices of the Enslaved brings the experiences of enslaved people to the centre of the history of Dutch transatlantic slavery, revealing the people behind the records and the complicated worlds in which they lived.